She blinked. “Give me a blade. Truly,” she insisted when he just looked at her. “I am in earnest. You saw me with a rock. Imagine me with a blade.”
“I’m terrified,” he muttered, but unsheathed the blade wrapped at his thigh and slipped it to her, then pulled his hood up. “Now slide down as far as you can, sit as close as you can, and silence, if ever you can.”
“Pah,” she snorted from her dark, cloaked nest.
Griffyn lifted his head and, pressing his heels against Noir’s flanks, rode slowly through the bailey and under the inner gates, which were still raised, a good omen. This porter had not been alerted he was staying the night. Perhaps the outer guards were as ignorant.
No one even appeared to notice he was passing until he reached the guards at the outer bailey, and they waved him through with barely a glance.
He rode under the straining portcullis gate, the wicked wooden talons hanging half a foot above his head, and like that, they were outside in the king’s woods, he with a mission to accomplish and a heady woman huddled beneath his cape.
Chapter Eleven
Noir barely made a sound on the soft dirt path. His hooves trod through the damp, flat leaves. Overhead, the moon slid back and forth behind ragged clouds and cast shadows between the branches. In the darkness of the forest, small rustlings disturbed the underbrush and in the distance a larger animal, to judge by the sound, exploded a few sticks under paw. Overhead an owl winged by, disturbed by their intrusion, his hooting a haunting sound in a darkened wood.
Walking at the horse’s head, Griffyn was trying to understand the astonishing turn his night had taken, from unexpected battle to the unexpected cargo now riding his horse.
He scowled at a low-lying tree limb and sidestepped the path into a puddle of mud that would have reached to his shins if he hadn’t leapt back in time.
Said cargo, he admitted grudgingly, was an amiable enough companion. More so. Much more so. She was nothing he could have expected. Fleeing one of the most bloodthirsty barons in Stephen’s England, she had not cowered. She’d not fainted. She had not screamed or pitched or whined. She had stood at his side, fearless as any warrior, and smiled.
Smiled, for God’s sake.
Which is why he was doing it, he supposed.
He scowled.
The longer he walked, the colder he got, the more he ruminated on how this night had come to such an unforeseen conclusion, the more convinced he became of one fact. He tugged Noir to a halt and turned to confront his more-than-amiable, maddening cargo.
“You had no intention of staying,” he announced grimly.
Her heart-shaped face crumpled in confusion. “Staying where?”
“They could have been monks chanting Paternosters and you would have left at the first chance.”
Her face cleared. “Trust in this, Pagan, the men you left me with were not monks—”
“You couldn’t stop talking, could you?”
“What?”
“What did you say to them?”
She blushed. “I barely said a word about anything, but when they saw the coin—”
“I knew it. But I don’t think you left because it was unsafe. I think you left because you didn’t want to be there. And you never do things you don’t wish to do.”
Her jaw dropped. “That is simply not true!”
“Tell me the last thing you did that you wished otherwise.”
“I—I—I, why right now!” she sputtered, flinging her arm out. “Behold, here I sit on your beast of a horse and let you hold the reins, guiding me ever deeper into the king’s chase, with never a notion of whither I go, nor whence I might return. Might I prefer to be safely ensconced in a bed? Mayhap to sleep? Pah. Think you I chose this night, Pagan, I shall learn you a different tale.”
He started walking again, grimly satisfied. “Of course you chose it.”
He could feel her glare penetrating through the back of his head. “Then so did you.”
He didn’t reply. She was silent, too, for perhaps a moment, then her voice chirped up again, light and airy in the deep, dark wood.
“At least give me the reins.”
He laughed. He didn’t mean to, or want to, but there it was.
“Truly, Pagan. I have a way with horses.”
He looked over his shoulder. “Aye. Losing them.”
She smiled wanly.
He lifted his eyebrows. “Are you planning on losing mine?”
“Are you planning on dropping me off at another den of iniquity?” she retorted pleasantly.
He laughed again and hopped over a log. “They weren’t so much iniquitous.”
“True. They were vain, covetous, and self-serving. Let me think what that harkens to mind. Oh, aye: Men.”
His smile faded. “I won’t begrudge you your opinion, Raven.” He ducked his head to avoid another tree limb, and they walked awhile in companionable silence. “I personally wasn’t speaking so much of your woman-ness, but your…” he waved his hand vaguely in the air.
Gwyn’s eyes narrowed. “My what? What’s this?” She mimicked his hand wave.
“Your…” He pursed his lips, thinking. “Fickleness.”
“Fickleness? Fickleness? You think I’ve been fickle?”
He looked wary. “I’m just saying someone should keep a better eye on you—”
She slid off the horse and landed with a thud. “A better eye? On me?” She stalked forward, finger in the air. “Happens you might try being herded into marriage with someone whose very presence on the earth offends you, with warts and foul breath—”
“Endshire doesn’t have warts.”
“Oh, as if you’d know. He has them on his soul. Have you ever been chased through the streets of London and up the king’s highway? Have you ever been told to ride in a litter ‘for your protection’ so you don’t have your own horse to escape upon?
“Have you ever—” She was moving closer in a fury, every “you” punctuated by a jab toward his chest, until her fingertip hovered an inch away from his body. “—had your own inclinations but been thwarted by those who are simply stronger than you, and so they will always prevail. Because of these,” she said as she jabbed a furious finger toward his sword, “and those.” She reached out to pinch the muscles of his arm.
It was a mistake. The moment her hand closed around the bunched strength of his upper arm, encased in steel and leather, she felt his heat and power throbbing onto her, and almost fainted.
“Aye. I have,” he said in a deceptively quiet voice. “There is always someone stronger than thee. And what of me, mistress?” His gaze turned hard, his tone cold. “What of the things I have left behind tonight? How am I to figure in your mad accounting?”
He wrenched his arm away, breaking her stunned grip, then it was she in his grip, she propelled backwards, she leaned up against Noir. And she remembered far too well what had happened last she’d stood near the horse.
“Well,” she whispered. “Quite well, Pagan. You have been nothing but…my saviour.”
He was still a moment, his face a taut mask of impassive regard, then he flung his fingers open.
“Foolish,”